


on saberstaffs and monomolecular blades

by the_garbage_will_do



Series: reyuxmas [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Dark Rey (Star Wars), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21637936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: “Win me an empire,” she murmurs as if a mere galaxy can fill the void in her stomach, “Grand Marshal.”
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rey
Series: reyuxmas [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1620592
Comments: 21
Kudos: 90
Collections: Reyuxmas 2019





	on saberstaffs and monomolecular blades

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week 2 of Reyuxmas! The prompt "snow day" got me thinking about Starkiller, and you could say things snowballed from there.

In another world, the dark enforcer of the First Order might wear a mask. Snoke suggests one from time to time. He suggests full-body armor to keep her safe and unbroken, his precious tool, but she never gives him this. If she is weak, if she lets a blow fall on her face and crumples like a child under Unkar Plutt’s palm, so be it. Fate will take her when it wants.

She finds her bare face is a mask in its own right. Men tell themselves all manner of lies on seeing it— that she is a mere girl and therefore harmless. She shows them her delicate features and lets them beguile and disarm, dropping their defenses, readying the way for her saberstaff.

(If they can see her pretty face when she ignites it, it doubles their terror.)

She has eavesdropped on a thousand men’s minds and grown bored of them all. 

.

Armitage Hux seems at first glance as tiring as the rest of High Command— a clone in every sense but the literal. He speaks with the same mechanical Imperial accent. He wears the same pressed outfit and the same rigid expressions. The same unflappable overconfidence.

Yet from time to time, his mask slips out of place.

Like all the rest he watches her. She doesn’t care until his accent slips, until it rolls an r rough where it shouldn’t, a loose thread hinting at some history not yet reconditioned away. She pulls it with the Force, expecting him to unravel in a single tug.

He simply glances her way, mist-grey eyes skimming down her frame, and gives her nothing.

“General?”

He pauses when she calls, wise enough not to test his rank against hers. “Lady Ren?”

“You watched me through this whole meeting.”

“No more than the others did,” he replies coolly.

True. “But what do _you_ make of me?”

She has asked this question a hundred times before. It presses overeager officers onto their back foot. It elicits the same three answers. There are those who want to run from her, and those who want to bed her, and those vexed souls who want both at once. They bore her, all.

“You seem underfed,” he answers, before turning sharply and leaving the room.

Stunned, she watches him go.

She wears no mask and regrets it every time she catches sight of her face in the mirror and sees its knife-edge lines. There are inches she will never recover, lost to starvation in the Jakku desert. There are sunken holes in her pretty face that will not fill out. There is a haunted roughness to her eyes that all the Order’s nutrition packs cannot smooth away.

.

In her dreams she hungers, wandering a sandstorm that has long since claimed her. 

In the early years, just after Snoke had lifted her from the desert with leathery hands that had seemed so kind, she might have run to his quarters. Not afraid of the dark, like children ought to be. Frightened instead of Jakku’s scorching sunlight, afraid she might be dropped back in the desert and that all the food and water and shelter of the Order might be suddenly snatched away. She wanted an assurance that she’d never be sent away again, something to trust, absolute and unconditional.

“You’ll never go hungry again,” Snoke had promised her, “as long as you stay a good girl.”

She listened and trusted. She filed down her terror, making it small and presentable.

Belonging. She spent nine pitiful years in the desert, yearning for it. Now she belongs to Snoke and wonders why her hunger still smolders like embers in her chest.

.

Hux pretends moderation. He presents himself as one of the enlightened, a rational man who calculates each decision with impeccable logic and due circumspection. One glimpse of his mind, and the mask falls apart. Rey once grazed it and got nothing— nothing sane or coherent, no facade or framework to his soul.

But what there is: a hurricane rage, cyclones ripping waters to winged white shreds and flinging the ocean into the sky. No half-measures, only a wasteland collapsing into insatiable seas. The roiling violence masks a constant, but she perceives it soon enough. A hunger, absolute and equal to hers.

She breaks into the good general’s quarters. In starkness they rival her own. The two of them know better than to trust material objects.

Still Hux has woven silver edges into his carpets and cabinets and shelves. They glisten like daggers, a subtle threat, a thread of his soul laid bare. She runs her hands across the silver-strung coverlet of his bed and dares to wonder.

.

“You went through my personal belongings,” Hux says coolly, waiting at her threshold that night.

She grants him a cool stare she doesn’t mean and then steps aside, allowing him to enter. The door shuts behind him.

“If you have questions, you might consider asking me directly. I would understand entirely if my technical research has piqued your curiosity—”

“Why did you hate your father?”

Hux freezes, his thoughts an inscrutable storm. Well-trained, he does not yield an inch to her mind probe. She cannot say the same for his co-conspirator, Captain Phasma. 

“Why did you hate your father?” she repeats, not giving an inch.

He narrows his eyes.

“Give me an honest answer,” she demands, cheeks flushing hot. “You had a father who loved you, he gave a damn about you—”

“I had the greatest respect for the late Commandant.”

He says it so evenly she almost mistakes it for a lie.

“Then why?”

“Why what?” he says, the words rehearsed and lax. _Bored._

“Why did you kill him?”

“From birth, Brendol Hux raised me for that end. Sharpened me into his perfect weapon.”

She shivers.

“And I have no objection to that,” he says, quietly. “To being a useful tool. I simply refused to be his.”

He looks to her.

.

Armitage Hux is nothing and no one’s. He comes from nowhere.

More precisely, he comes from Arkanis, an odd little forgotten planet in the Outer Rim, one more world that tied itself to the Empire’s coatstrings in hopes of forgetting its own wretchedness. Scrape away the veneer of Imperial respectability, and Arkanis has nothing but battened-down hatches and hurricanes and a ramshackle brogue, all overstretched vowels and rolled r’s. Its people wear gaunt faces and haunted eyes. They are derided for their groveling and greed. Few notice their terror, their rage, the ravenous void underneath their pretty manners.

Their histories tell of a siege laid by the Republic in the Empire’s final year, and the famine that followed close. One look in Hux’s storm-grey eyes, and she knows he hasn’t forgotten.

She has tried to forget. It has done her no good. She remembers she came from nothing and nowhere, before she called herself Kira Ren.

“You are a goddess among droids,” Snoke tells her, fattening her up with his rich praise. Once she could live on that and nothing else.

Now she gazes up at him, the leer in his teeth and the calculation in his eyes, and sees nothing but Unkar Plutt.

.

“Lady Ren, you are reckless. Your altruism is a menace to the Order’s goals—”

“Do you question my loyalty?”

“To the Order’s equipment, then. I sent you out with three fully functional shuttles and you brought back half of one.”

“Three-quarters at the least.”

“You did irrevocable damage to both our schedule and our budget.”

“I brought back every man alive.”

“And nearly broke your own neck in the process!”

“Careful, General. One might think you care.”

.

He cares.

It surprises her, though perhaps she should have guessed. He possesses a reckless kindness as potent and fickle as her own. A flash flood, and she drowns.

He is kind beyond all reason, and in an instant he is hers. His loyalty is absolute. He lies vulnerable, bare skin and bare throat and eyes closed, wrapped in the sheer black covers of her bed. A weapon of folded steel, he gives himself so easily, trained since childhood to throw himself away for a grand cause.

She decides to try out a mask— black, but for the silver lines across the brow.

.

They travel to the Jedi Temple of the planet Ilum. In another world she might wander it with reverence, seeking a place for herself amidst these ancient woods. Now she only wants it in ashes.

“I’ll have this temple destroyed,” he remarks casually at just that moment.

Snoke has granted Hux this planet. It offers nothing but forests and endless storms— snowstorms, blessed with a deadly chill.

“Ilum will make an excellent base,” he says, roaming it at her side. “We can take the whole surface to build our factories. We’ll never rely on anyone else again.”

A planet of his own.

“Then,” he adds, “there’s the core to consider.”

“What of it?”

“The technology’s at an early stage still, but the core could be weaponized. Imagine sucking up the sun and turning it to ammunition and firing it back out at the whole galaxy.”

He will make this planet hers, too.

.

There’s a delicate shift between belonging _to_ and belonging _with_ _._ It strikes her like a groundquake.

He is hers. For the first time she has something to lose, and her terror flares fast as the wildfires Hux sets to clear Ilum’s evergreen forests.

She is his, and in time he might know it. She must live to keep him. Her loyalty is absolute, and she will not suffer anyone else’s claim on it.

.

He stands out in the aftermath of a blizzard, careless of the blue on his lips, a lone figure on an icy mountain peak. She joins him to look out on their endless winter. Once this world was Ilum. Now it is burnt and scarred and hollowed out for the fire to come. Their precious Starkiller.

“Pity about Snoke,” she says.

The side of his lip curls into a smile. “Assassinated by a Resistance smuggler. Who could have guessed?”

This is the official story, a pretty lie she has branded into the minds of most of her officers. She has bent most of High Command to her will and planned an elegant series of deaths for the few who resist reconditioning. 

Hux knows all this.

In another world she might bend him too. He might buckle under the force of her fingers about his throat as she flees a monster more terrifying than herself. Instead she looks out at the army of machines drilling deep in the valley before them. A whole army under his command, emptying out the planet’s core. They open a ravenous void all for her, and she stares at it hungrily.

“How will you use the weapon?” he asks.

“For good,” she replies evenly. “There are wars to cut short. There are famines to end. With Starkiller at our disposal, we will bring peace to the entire galaxy.”

“And if you’re honest?”

She glances at him.

“The Republic burnt us up and spat out the ashes. It’s time to return the favor.”

His smile grows— teeth bared, all naked greed.

.

In another world the dark enforcer of the First Order might spout this rhetoric without meaning it, doubting the honor of such violence, dallying with the light. But they are starving children who come from nowhere and aren’t afraid of the dark. They grab what they can. They will take up their fate however they want it.

“Win me an empire,” she murmurs as if a mere galaxy can ever fill the void in her stomach, “Grand Marshal.”


End file.
